PREFACE.

PREVIOUS to the publication of the folio edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works in 1623 under the auspices of his fellow-actors Heminge and Condell, seventeen of his plays had appeared in quarto at various dates,-viz. King Richard the Second, King Richard the Third, Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's lost, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, King Henry the Fifth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and Othello. As I have elsewhere enumerated the different impressions of those quartos (see List of Editions, p. cxxxii. sqq.), and incidentally noticed their peculiarities (see Account of the Plays, p. cliii. sqq.), I need only observe here, that, though they found their way to the press without the consent either of the author or of the managers, it is certain that nearly all of them were printed, with more or less correctness and completeness, from transcripts of мs. copies belonging to the theatre.

The folio of 1623 includes, with the exception of Pericles, the plays which had previously appeared in quarto, and twenty others which till then had remained in manuscript. The title-page of the volume runs thus,-Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies: and in a prefatory address "To the Great Variety of Readers," the editors announce

1 Usually supposed to have been written by Ben Jonson.-In Notes and Queries, Sec. Series, vol. iii. 8, Mr. Bolton Corney expresses his conviction that Edward Blount "was the real editor" of the folio of 1623: and on that

what they have done in the following terms: "It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But, since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his

subject he has recently favoured me with several communications, of which I regret that the limits of a note prevent me from giving more than the following portions. "For some years before I ventured to ascribe the editorship of the entire volume to Edward Blount, it had been my firm notion that the two paragraphs of which the address 'To the Great Variety of Readers' consists could not have been written by the same person. The affectation of smartness, and the anxiety to vend, which disfigure the first paragraph, are utterly unlike the sober criticism and earnestness of feeling which form the substance of the second. What had Ben Jonson to do with the sale of the volume? What had Heminge and Condell to do with it after the transfer of the copyright? The persons chiefly interested in the sale of it were W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, J. Smethwick, and W. Aspley; and as Blount had taken up the pen, on various occasions, for more than twenty years,-sometimes writing in a scholar-like way, and sometimes fantastically,—to him I am inclined to ascribe the first paragraph of the address. To Heminge and Condell I assign the rest, and I admire the spirit of it." After enumerating various works edited by Blount, and among them the Ars Aulica of Lorenzo Ducci, 1607, which he dedicated to William Earl of Pembroke and Philip Earl of Montgomery as an expression of his "particular dutie,"-Mr. Corney asks, “Can it be conceived that the other proprietors [of the folio Shakespeare, 1623] would not have urged him to edit the volume? Could he decently refuse the office of editor? He had, moreover, a threefold motive to accept it:-1. As a fulfilment of his particular dutie' to the noble brothers to whom the volume is dedicated; 2. As one of the printers of the volume, and therefore in part responsible for its due execution; and 3. As one of the four publishers at whose charges the volume was printed." Mr. Corney also thinks it "possible that Blount may have had some influence in procuring the commendatory verses prefixed to the volume. Of the four specimens which it contains, that by Holland was not written for the occasion; that by I. M. is of uncertain authorship; and the others are by Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges. Now, Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges contributed verses to the Guzman de Alfarache of Matheo Aleman, of which Blount was the proprietor and editor, in the same year."

When Mr. Corney ascribes to Blount the editorship of the first folio, he, of course, does not mean that Blount had any concern in selecting the materials of which it consists, but that Blount undertook to see through the press the "copy" (a jumble of printed books and manuscripts) which Heminge and Condell had handed over to him :-and how was that task performed? with a carelessness almost unexampled !

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friends the office of their care and pain, to have collected and published them; and so to have published them as where (before) you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it: his mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."2 But, as Malone long ago remarked, this statement concerning the imperfections of the quartos one and all, ❝is not strictly true of any but two of the whole number, The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry V.;" and "the quartos were in general the basis on which the folio editors built."4 It is demonstrable that Heminge and Condell printed Much ado about Nothing from the quarto of 1600, omitting some short portions and words here and there, and making some trivial changes, mostly for the worse:-that they printed Love's Labour's lost from the quarto of 1598, occasionally copying the old errors of the press; and though in a few instances they corrected the text, they more frequently corrupted it; spoilt the continuity of the dialogue in act iii. sc. 1. by omitting several lines, and allowed the preposterous repetitions in act iv. sc. 3. and act v. sc. 2.5 to stand as in the quarto :—that their text of A Midsummer-Night's Dream was mainly taken from Roberts's quarto,-by much the inferior of the two quartos of 1600,-its blunders being sometimes followed; and though they amended a few passages, they introduced not a few bad

2 See p. cxliv.

3 I need hardly observe that the quarto of Hamlet, 1603, which was unknown to Malone, does not form a third exception; for it was entirely superseded by the quarto of 1604.

4 Preface to Shakespeare, 1790.

5 See notes (65) and (112), vol. ii. pp. 167, 174.